The point for us to mark is that all these conspirators and violent men,
Bothwell (in exile or secretly in Scotland), Colville (in 1600 an exile
in Paris), the Laird of Spot, the Cranstouns, the infamous Archibald
Douglas, with Richard Douglas his nephew, and Logan of Restalrig, were
united, if not by real friendship, at least, as Thucydides says, by
‘partnership in desperate enterprises’ and by 1600 were active in a
subterranean way. If it is fair to say, _noscitur a sociis_, ‘a man is
known by the company he keeps,’ Logan of Restalrig bears the mark of the
secret conspirator. He had relations with persons more distinguished
than his Chirnsides and Whittingham Douglases, though they were of near
kin to the Earl of Morton. His mother, a daughter of Lord Gray, married
Lord Home, after the death of Logan’s father. The Laird of Restalrig was
thus a half-brother of the new Lord Home, a Warden of the Border, and
also was first cousin of the beautiful, accomplished, and infamous Master
of Gray, the double spy of England and of Rome.
Logan, too, like the Master, had diplomatic ambitions. In 1586 (July 29)
we find him corresponding with the infamous Archibald Douglas, one of
Darnley’s murderers, whom James had sent, in the crisis of his mother’s
fate, as his ambassador to Elizabeth. In 1586, Logan, with two other
Logans, was on the packed jury which acquitted Douglas of Darnley’s
murder. Logan was a retainer of Bothwell, that meteor-like adventurer
and king-catcher, and he asks Douglas to try to procure him employment
(of course as a spy) from Walsingham, the English statesman. {157}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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